8 GOVT FALLS AFTER VIOLENT STREET PROTESTS Burkina Faso: End of the ‘error’ of Africa’s strongman rule? Blaise Compao≥é p≥obably ove≥estimated his own cunning and unde≥-estimated the weight of histo≥y and demog≥aphics By DANIEL K. KALINAKI The EastAfrican tober 31, following violent protests in the capital Ouagadougou, with army chief Honoré Traore taking over as head of state. Compaoré went from try- P ing to extend his rule in Burkina Faso by five years, to trying to hang onto power and complete his current term but angry protestors burnt parliament, homes of Members of Parliament and demanded his resignation. Earlier on Thursday, the army said that it had dissolved the government and announced a 12-month transition in an attempt to return calm to the country. Compaoré, in power for 27 years, had insisted he would stay in charge during the transition period but angry protestors poured into the streets and demanded his immediate resignation. Several people were report- ed dead in the battles that raged on Thursday with several more injured, although some sections of the police and army were said to have joined in on the side of the protestors. It is too early to tell how events in Burkina Faso will pan out, but the protests in the capital, Ouagadougou, are significant beyond the borders of the small, poor, landlocked country. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, a series of uprisings between December resident Blaise Compaoré resigned on Friday, Oc- 2010 and December 2013 that swept away entrenched regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya that many previously considered invincible, many wondered when and if these revolutionary street protests would spread south of the Sahara. Instead, the Arab Spring spread mostly within North Africa and the Middle East, inspiring regime changes in Yemen, civil uprisings in Bahrain and Syria, as well as major protests in Iraq, Kuwait, Morocco, Israel and Algeria. In Sudan and Uganda, the only two African countries where the green shoots of revolution appeared briefly, authorities were quick to step in and clamp down on dissent, often violently. In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni’s militarised police force imposed a permanent blockade on all public squares and open spaces in the city, battered activists who tried to launch “Walk to Work” protests, and effectively put opposition leader Kizza Besigye under a quasi-permanent state of “preventive arrest.” The protests in Ouaga- dougou, which seem to have taken many across the continent and the world by surprise, suggest that the green shoots of revolution remain alive, and that the parched lands of sub-Saharan Africa remain thirsty for the blood of tyrants and patriots. A close examination of the events in Burkina Faso should worry Africa’s tyrants and inspire its patriots, from Bamako to Burundi. Compaoré took power in 1987 in a counter-revolutionary coup d’état masterminded by the Ivory Coast and orchestrated, in the background, by France, in which Thomas Sankara was martyred. Sankara had spooked the French with his revolutionary ideals, including seeking to cut the umbilical cord with Paris, inciting African states to reject the large foreign debt that had accrued from the exploitative history of colonialism and an unfair trading regime, and calling for self-sufficiency and deeper intra-African trade. While those ideas are to- day seen as de rigueur, they were far ahead of the curve in the late 1980s when Africa was firmly under monolithic political systems, or under the grip of corrupt, despotic strongmen like Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Mobutu Sese Seko, Félix HouphouëtBoigny, Muammar Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak, Juvenal Habyarimana, Kenneth Kaunda, Daniel arap Moi, et cetera. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union inspired a continent-wide political-economic revolution in Africa. This was manifested in two forms. First, no longer able to play the West against the East, the post-Independence monolithic political systems were forced to adopt political pluralism and open themselves up to competition. Second, with the collapse of socialism, economic liberalisation was now forced on Africa in Structural Adjustment Programmes that came with privatisation, drastic reductions in state spending on education and health, the removal of subsidies and foreign-exchange controls, and The EastAfrican NEWS NOVEMBER 1-7,2014 the opening up of domestic markets. Neither leg of this “revo- lution” went far enough, however. Economically, the free-market reforms sparked economic growth but they widened inequality and created predatory and corrupt networks of local elites who, either on their own or in conjunction with foreign capital, took national assets on the cheap and extracted private value. Politically, the introduc- tion of multiparty systems claimed a few early victims, such as Kaunda in Zambia and Mathieu Kérékou in Benin but, by and large, the Independence parties continued to dominate power, bem it Tanu/CCM in Tanzania, Frelimo in Mozambique, MPLA in Angola, and so on. The more the leaders changed, the more the dominant party, ideology and vested interests remained the same. The fragmentation of the continent into many ethnicbased political parties that many had feared did not necessarily happen. Instead, the competition for power and resources became militarised, giving rise to civil conflicts in DR Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, etc. Even where military conflicts predated the end of the Cold War, for instance in Mozambique, Angola or Uganda, political pluralism was offered as an antidote in form, rather than substance. Rivals could compete, but they could not win. By the time Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, Tunisian REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE RETWEETED In the land that Sankara renamed Burkina Faso — or the land of the upright men — citizens have taken a stand against manipulative politics. While much was made of the mobilisation abilities of social media in the Arab Spring, Compaoré’s rejection has been almost primal — the Le Balai Citoyen Facebook page had just over 18,000 likes on Friday morning and Internet access is limited. However, with mobile telephony connectivity going from a million lines to 10 million between 2006 and 2012, the revolution will not be retweeted but it will be texted. market vendor self-immolated and lit the spark for the Arab Spring uprisings, African countries could roughly be divided into two political groupings. There were the Lions, which included countries that had made meaningful political reforms, including new constitutions, separation of power, and limits to presidential authority and tenure, that allowed for the peaceful transfer of power from one elected leader to another. These included Malawi, Ghana, Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria, and others that had a history of strongman rule. In these countries, once an elected leader accepted defeat and peacefully handed over power to another, it did not just open the door to genuinely competitive politics; it blew it off its hinges. However, there had also emerged a category of countries — let’s call them the Ostriches — that has mastered the rhetoric and form of Western-style democracy, such as regular elections, without the substance of strong institutions, rule of lawtransparent and accountable governance. These include countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, Uganda, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Equatorial Guinea, et cetera,